Cajun Boy already hit one excellent clip from last night’s episode of The Daily Show, but I’d be doing all of you a disservice if I didn’t also direct your attention to the opening, which featured an extended, delicious takedown of CNBC’s coverage of JP Morgan Chase’s recent $13 billion fine/penalty/settlement thingy (financial term) stemming from the 2008 mortgage-backed securities fiasco.

The segment is a joy to watch from beginning to end, but the real kill shot comes in the second clip, when Stewart uses Jim Cramer’s own words and buffoonish horn-honking clownery in an old clip — AGAIN — to make him look like … well, like a buffoonish horn-honking clown. Someone should really let that guy know that the things he says on camera live on after the words leave his mouth. Actually, no. Let’s not. This is too fun.

The whole Pareene-Bartiromo exchange is worth watching in full. Especially for the way Bartiromo kept coming back to the “duh, they’re making money, so how can they be doing anything wrong?” schtick.

Maria Bartiromo: Alex, to you first. Legal problems aside, JP Morgan remains one of the best, if not the best performing major bank in the world today. You believe the leader of that bank should step down?

Alex Pareene: I think that any time you’re looking at the greatest fine in the history of Wall Street regulation, it’s really worth asking should this guy stay in his job. In any other industry — I can’t think of another industry. If you managed a restaurant, and it got the biggest health department fine in the history of restaurants, no one would say “Yeah, but the restaurant’s making a lot of money. There’s only a little bit of poison in the food.”

“Not doing anything wrong” is different than “shouldn’t be fired”. The reuters article is the one spreading schtick: “CEOs should be responsible to someone other than their shareholders”. How does this work? Oh, I see banks should have a regulated rate of return. I might actually buy that, but until that day, the guy is doing his job.

Again, not saying that Dimon is “good” or “right” in an ethical or moral way, but he’s doing his job. To sidestep WaMu and Bear laibilitys (which BofA failed to do with Countrywide) is good work as a CEO.

I don’t think he should be fired, but to say he’s not accountable is laughable.

Dimon himself said that he was responsible for those liabilities. He set aside a $28 million fund specifically to deal with them.

For CNBC to now huff that he’s not responsible, and that the price tag associated with that responsibility — a price tag he had a say in setting, a price tag that is far far lower than what he himself thought they’d have to pay — is just pathetic.

So one of the reasons why I decided to never go into banking outside of the brutal hours you’re saddled with out of college is because everyone seems incompetent. This can’t be true because banks do make good decisions that increase their profits. So I ask, where are the smart people? Are they all risk analysts and underwriters?

Banks make profit because banking is basically a government subsidized business. And by government subsidized, I actually mean GOVERNMENT SUBSIDIZED.
And before some GOPper comes over here to demonstrate that his/her basic command of arithmetics will save us all: The financial industrial complex is very bipartisan, because without bankers Chuck Schumer had nobody to sell himself fundraising dinner spots to.

It’s both. And the risk analysts and underwriters reside on the commercial side. While the packaging and reselling of loans happened at the investment bank (actually at bear, who they acquired), the bulk of these fines relate to problems on the commercial side (risk and underwriting)

bob – not to be that guy, but you can disprove a negative – you do so by proving the positive opposite to be true. You cannot prove a negative. Which seems to be what you were saying, just wanted to make sure it was all clear.